


Eventual

by pwincess



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:14:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pwincess/pseuds/pwincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was always going to happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eventual

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noplacespecial](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noplacespecial/gifts).



> You said you wanted a story that took place post-movie and apparently I read "movie" as "civilization."

In hindsight, it seemed obvious that Division would set something into motion that it couldn't control, even with its limitless resources and its far-reaching fingers.

Too much damage to Move. Too many broken people for all their Stitches to put back together. Something made of too many millions and millions of tiny parts for even their most powerful Watcher to see how things would end up.

Except--

 

* * *

 

They're in a laundromat for the afternoon, just to be out of the heat. Outside it's arid, brutal, a desert heat even though they're in the middle of what should be a forest. But in here it's cool and dank, with half an inch of standing water slowly rotting the tile floor away.

Cassie lazes across two top-loaders while Nick pops quarter after quarter into one of the other machines. The coin cache has been busted open by some desperate person, so he's using the same two quarters over and over. The machine doesn't work, the water having been shut off months ago, and the electricity months before that.

Cassie finds a note on the wall, in a frame. Her mother's handwriting in ink on a simple sheet of printer paper: _This was always going to happen._

* * *

 

Before, they spent three years on the run, if you include the year they had in the South, laying low. Cassie went to school there. She got asked to the dance and kissed a boy. She got enough detentions to be suspended, once. Nick signed up for some community college classes and worked part time in the college library. They forged some documents and rented a house. They had their own rooms.

They haven't slept in separate rooms in over a year.

"What are we even doing," Cassie demands in the whimsically exasperated tone that Nick thinks people must lose the ability to use when you turn 20. He hopes, anyway.

"What," he sighs, trying to shrug the tension out of his shoulders. They're practicing, and Nick has just Moved an rusting 18-wheeler completely off the freeway. They try to keep their skills honed.

"Before, we were trying to save my mom, or find Kira, or do whatever to Division," she waves her hand vaguely and that just about sums it up. "They're dead now. So what are we _doing_ , Nick, let's _do_ something."

Nick is not in the mood for this. "I don't know what to tell you, Cassie. I mean, what do you want to do, become a published writer? I don't know what people do these days."

Cassie makes a face at him. "Don't be a jerk," she says.

 

* * *

 

Cassie saw the first bomb drop, a year ago, more than a week before it actually happened. At the time, it made her panic, the weight of responsibility that came with the knowledge.

She and Nick were powerless to stop something of that scale, and even if they could, what else was there to do? Destroying the origin site seemed like the only solution, then. When she told him about it, Nick had only said, "Does it work?"

Cassie didn't know. She tried, after that, even after it was too late to even warn anyone, but she couldn't see.

It didn't work--of course it didn't--and Cassie still wonders if she and Nick could have done anything.

 _This was always going to happen,_ and Cassie believes it now because her mother had seen all the possible futures, had even seen this far, so she would know. She knew they would be here. She must have left this note years ago, before the bombs, before Division got her, _everything_.

"Nick, where are we?" Cassie demands with a shaky voice.

"I don't know," he says, hand on her shoulder, and Cassie realizes it's been weeks since she's known. It hadn't mattered before now. They were somewhere; they were alive; they were together. Those were the only important things. "We'll find out," he promises.

 

* * *

 

"Y'know, our lives are really different now." Cassie's arm gives out and the bottle clanks down against the rim of the table.

"Cassie, even when you're not having a vision, you come up with the--just-- _the_ most brilliant insights when you're drunk," Nick says.

Cassie snorts and puts a foot up on the table. "Nick," she tells him seriously, "the world ended."

Nick looks back at her, poker-faced, patiently.

She waits for a minute, till he starts to smile, before slurring, "Used to be people were out to kill us. But now, people only want to kill us if they happen to run into us, usually. So that's nice."

Nick smothers his face in his hands to hid his grin, not wanting to encourage her.

It's happened a few times, now: other survivors who want their food and water, willing to use whatever means necessary. It was why Cassie now took to the bottle every few days, Watching for danger. She's getting better at it all the time. Soon she'll be able to look down different paths, she thinks, like her mother could. 

Once Nick gets his face under control, he looks at her with a wide-eyed, earnest look. "That's how our lives are different," he says, and she nods. "That's a really nice thought, Pollyanna. I'd love to have that on a pillow."

Cassie laughs until her eyes go distant and her hand comes up to hover over them. "Oh," she says lightly when the vision is finished, blinking it away. She picks up her #2 pencil and draws a picture of the two of them, smiling figures, riding in a truck. Nick laughs.

 

* * *

 

Cassie turns 18 just after Christmas, which they missed. The weather is hot and dry. Just like every day. They hang out in a ritzy hotel lobby with an impressive bay of mostly-intact windows.

When they were on the run from Division, they lived for months on end out of hotels. They almost never had the means or security to split up into separate rooms.

At the seedier places, a grown man checking in with a tiny teenaged girl--a child, really--didn't seem to raise any eyebrows. But at any establishment that didn't promise to have fleas, they would get a polite, firm question about the nature of their relationship.

 _She's my sister,_ Nick would say. And then, _I know, same eyes, right? Everyone says that. Two doubles would be perfect._ And even though no one had ever said that, it was a solid bluff.

In the first year, Cassie thought that they'd be together forever, that fate had set them down this road with one another. She imagined that when she was 18, no one would give them a second look when they checked into a hotel together.

When she was a little older, she thought that she was foolish, childish to think in terms like forever, or destiny.

Now, she's pretty sure that _together forever_ is the only thing they've got going for them after everything. Even if they hated each other, she can't imagine a life without him. They weathered the storm together, and when they took inventory after the fact, all they had was each other. That's just how things ended up.  And if that's not fate, what is?

Now, of course, there's no one around who gives a damn what he's doing with her. And he's doing nothing.

"Nick, I'm 18 now," she says.

"I know," he says. "I gave you a present."

She rolls her eyes. He'd found her a bottle of cake flavored vodka in the hotel bar and handed it to her. She secretly considered it a pretty thoughtful gift.

"Well anyway, you can kiss me now, if you want," she tells him.

He snorts a laugh, chokes on his vodka.

"What!" she exclaims, and throws a fancy cushion at him.

"You think I was waiting till you were 18 to kiss you?" he says, face red from choking. "Why would I?"

"Then what?" she asks. She knows it's not her, because surely he must have resigned himself to this long before now.

"I don't know." He's still smiling, and he shrugs, unapologetic. "I don't know exactly. Are you ready for that?"

"Yes, Nick. God."

He gets up and kneels next to her chair. He doesn't give her a chaste "birthday girl" kind of kiss, which is a relief. It's all tongue and fire and she pushes back and it's perfect. They kiss each other like it's obvious; it's the way they were supposed to be; the way they always are.

 

* * *

 

Their prophesized truck turns out to be an RV. A real, working RV with a generator in the lower compartment. They could even have an honest-to-god hot shower, if they can find enough fresh water.

"We should paint it like the Mystery Machine," Nick says, straight-faced, when they get the engine running. "We can drive it around stopping ghosts and zombies."

Cassie stares out the front windshield. The road isn't in front of them, but it will be. "I'm so glad there are no zombies," she comments. "Ugh."

 

* * *

 

They're on the road for about a week, making their way slowly north, and then they find a lake that's not dried up. The water is clear and cool, and Cassie has read the manual on how to work the pump for the RV, but it's about a million degrees too hot for the hot shower she's been dreaming about, so they both strip off their sticky clothes and jump into the water.

The lake small but deep, and crowded in with vegetation like they haven't seen in months, deep green grasses and ferns and a bush of violets. Nick picks one and gives it to Cassie as they tread water. She rolls her eyes and he kisses her cheek.

"You gave me a flower once, but I doubt this one's all that lifechanging," he says, and she doesn't know quite what he means, but it sounds like _this was always going to happen_ , like things you can't control, like fate, and Cassie smiles.


End file.
